The Obama administration would prosecute to the fullest extent of the law anyone caught wearing paramilitary uniforms, brandishing weapons and blocking the entrance to a polling place while using racial slurs to intimidate voters, right?
Nope.
Career Justice Department lawyers pursuing a case against New Black Panther Party members accused of intimidating voters in Philadelphia were overruled by new political appointees and ordered to drop the case, The Washington Times reports.
One of the Black Panthers told a white voter, “You’re about to be ruled by the black man, cracker.”
Imagine if the roles were reversed and members of the New KKK engaged in precisely the same behavior, including telling a black voter, “You’re about to be ruled by the white man, n*****.” Imagine. They would already be serving jail time. But the exact same racially motivated intimidation is dismissed by new political appointees at our own Justice Department.
A civil rights activist who worked for RFK’s campaign in 1968 witnessed the intimidation and said in a sworn affidavit:
“In all my experience in politics, in civil rights litigation and in my efforts in the 1960s to secure the right to vote in Mississippi … I have never encountered or heard of another instance in the United States where armed and uniformed men blocked the entrance to a polling location.”
The worst instance of voter intimidation this life-long civil rights activist has ever seen, but hey, it’s no big deal. Maybe the men were just filled with empathy, their judgment naturally superior to that of the white men they were intimidating.
David Souter was worth $6.1 million before the market crash, Politico.com reveals in a story about Sotomayor’s finances. He made his money primarily by investing in New Hampshire banks, according to the report. Maybe he’ll take some of that out and do some work on his house now that he’ll be back here full-time.
I have some thoughts on that subject at AmSpec today.
The lede:
Take everything that is known about Sonia Sotomayor and change three factors — her race, sex, and family’s initial socioeconomic status — and the points cited in praise of her selection would be diminished by more than 50 percent. The complimentary commentary would be reduced to: Mr. Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude from Princeton and has had a breadth of experience over his lengthy legal career. That’s it.
With its editorial today endorsing Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, The New York Times editorial page has sunk to new depths of intellectual vacuity. Here is a breakdown:
President Obama seems to have made an inspired choice in picking Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. She has an impressive judicial record, a stellar academic background and a compelling life story. Judge Sotomayor would also be a trailblazing figure in the mold of Thurgood Marshall, becoming the first member of the nation’s large and growing but still under-represented Hispanic population to serve on the court.
Based on what we know now, the Senate should confirm her so she can join the court when it begins its new term in October.
Those are the first two graphs of the editorial. The Times concludes, based primarily on Judge Sotomayor’s race, sex, and “compelling life story” that she should be a Supreme Court justice. It doesn’t even find a Senate confirmation hearing necessary. The Senate can confirm her simply “based on what we know now.”
And what do we know now? The Times doesn’t have much to say about that beyond what it pulled from the White House press release.
Third graph:
It’s impossible not to be moved by Judge Sotomayor’s story — born in the Bronx to Puerto Rican parents and brought up in a city housing project. She was found to have diabetes as a child, and her father, a factory worker, died when she was 9, leaving her mother, a nurse, to raise her and her brother. Judge Sotomayor attended Princeton, from which she graduated summa cum laude, and Yale Law School, where she was an editor of the law review.
She rose from rags to prominence, so confirm her.
Fourth graph:
Her legal experience is impressive and wide-ranging. She spent five years as a prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office and was a partner in a commercial litigation firm. She has been a federal judge for 16 years, serving on both a district court, where she presided over trials, and an appellate court. As a member of the New York-based United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, she is known for being smart, extraordinarily well prepared and deeply engaged.
She has had a long legal career, so confirm her.
Fifth graph:
In her rulings, Judge Sotomayor has repeatedly displayed the empathy Mr. Obama has said he is looking for in a justice. She has listened attentively to, and often ruled in favor of, people who have been discriminated against, defendants and other groups that are increasingly getting short shrift in the federal courts. She has shown little patience for the sort of procedural bars that conservative judges have been using to close the courthouse door on people whose rights have been violated.
As a judge, she ignores the law and sides with people based on the groups to which they belong, so confirm her. The phrase “procedural bars that conservative judges have been using to close the courthouse door” is an intellectually dishonest phrase meaning “rule of law.” The Times opines that what the law actually says is irrelevant, it’s the so-called social justice of the outcome that should guide a judge’s decisions.
Sixth graph:
Conservative activists have already begun trying to paint Judge Sotomayor as a liberal ideologue, but her carefully reasoned, fact-based decisions indicate otherwise. In many ways, her approach to the law is similar to that of Justice David Souter, whose seat she would take.
Never mind that Sotomayor has described herself as a liberal, she’ll really be independent, like Souter (who was consistently liberal).
Seventh graph:
The Senate will have to carefully scrutinize Judge Sotomayor’s record on and off the bench, as it must for anyone seeking to join the court. If no big surprises turn up, it is not clear that Senate Republicans will expend much effort trying to block this nomination. Apart from her qualifications, they may decide that in light of their desire to win over Latino voters — and their low chance of winning a confirmation battle, given the Democrats’ big Senate majority — it is not worth the fight.
We said a few paragraphs ago that the Senate should confirm her. Here is our obligatory nod to the rule of law which we actually don’t believe in. Oh, and we need to make Republicans think that if they vote against her they will feel the wrath of Hispanics.
Eighth graph:
If Judge Sotomayor joins the court, it will be a special point of pride for Hispanic-Americans — as it was for Jews, blacks and women before them to see one of their own take a seat on the highest tribunal in the land. It will also bring the paltry number of female justices back to two. And as Democratic Party strategists have no doubt calculated, the selection could give Mr. Obama and his party a boost with a key voting group.
Supreme Court justices should be picked based on race, sex, ethnicity and other demographic and political concerns. Never mind the law.
Ninth graph:
Judge Sotomayor, though, is more than just a distinguished member of two underrepresented groups. She is an accomplished lawyer and judge, who could become an extraordinary Supreme Court justice.
Though we have spent most of this editorial dismissing the notion that anything matters more than race, sex, ethnicity and politics when appointing Supreme Court justices, we are obliged to note that she also is professionally accomplished if we hope to avoid merciless mockery from people with brains.
The FBI released today 1,000 pages of new material, including previously unpublished photos, on Bonnie and Clyde’s infamous crime spree and how law officers tracked them and caught them.
The RNC posted a not very clever video likening Nancy Pelosi to a James Bond villain before removing it because of complaints. The video was stupid, to be sure. It was also ham handed and clumsy. But the most tasteless part was that it apparently used copyrighted images without permission. Republicans are supposed to be the party of private property rights.
In Manchester’s Memorial Day parade yesterday, Alderman Mark Roy, a Democrat, was up at the front of the line walking beside Rep. Carol Shea-Porter. Roy is running for mayor and has marched in the parade before. It was curious that he was in front while Mayor Frank Guinta was walking in the second row, behind Roy and Shea-Porter. Guinta was beside Alderman Ted Gatsas, who is probably going to run for mayor this year.
I just heard a caller to a national radio show argue that picking someone who grew up poor and Hispanic (Judge Sotomayer) for the Supreme Court was wise because the people who got us into the financial mess we are in were the best and the brightest, so since they screwed things up so badly we cannot put any faith in achievement and credentials, but should turn to the poor and the downtrodden to run things.
I suspect no one actually believes that nonsense. Obama clearly doesn’t. To whom did he immediately turn to fix the financial crisis? Tim Geithner, credentialed, accomplished financial insider. The President didn’t pick some line worker to run GM. He picked another millionaire CEO. To find people to get us out of the mess we are in, Obama picked from the broader pool of “the people who got us here.” Qualifications and intellectual capabilities matter, a point that is so obvious it shouldn’t need rebutting. Amazingly, it does.
If you read one political column this weekend, make it Rich Lowry’s excellent column on President Obama. It begins:
Put Barack Obama in front of a teleprompter and one thing is certain - he’ll make himself appear the most reasonable person in the room.
Rhetorically, he is in the middle of any debate, perpetually surrounded by finger-pointing extremists who can’t get over their reflexive combativeness and ideological fixations to acknowledge his surpassing thoughtfulness and grace.
This is how Obama, whose position on abortion is indistinguishable from NARAL’s, can speechify on abortion at Notre Dame and come away sounding like a pitch-perfect centrist. It’s natural, then, that his speech at the National Archives on national security should superficially sound soothing, reasonable, and even a little put-upon (oh, what President Obama has to endure from all those finger-pointing extremists).
Lowry shows how Obama’s rhetorical disingenuousness allows him to appear in the middle of every issue while staking out positions that are virtually indistinguishable from those of the people he caricatures as extremists.
The Concord Monitor editorialized today in favor of taxing more money out of the pockets of Concord residents during what virtually everyone is now calling the “worst recession since the Great Depression.” The Monitor believes it’s a good idea to raise taxes to save two police officer jobs, keep the library open longer hours and keep snow plowing at last winter’s level. The paper wants a tax hike that would raise $500,000 to accomplish those goals.
That might sound great to a lot of people. The paper says that raising that money to fund those services would be “worth doing to keep Concord the kind of city employers want to come to.” But who is going to pay those higher taxes? Employers. And their employees.
That $500,000 won’t just appear magically if the city raises tax rates. It will be removed from the local economy. Families and business owners who might use that money to buy more from local merchants or keep their employees on the job won’t have it and will have to make their own spending cuts. That’s what advocates of tax hikes never seem to get. Every dollar in “new revenue” for government is a dollar in lost revenue for a family or business.
Most people get that a recession hurts because people have less money to spend. That’s why the stimulus bill sailed through Congress. The idea was to put money in the hands of the people, who would then spend it. If recessions are bad because they reduce the amount of money people have to spend, then why are tax hikes — which reduce the amount of money people have to spend — good?
They aren’t good. But somehow lots of people believe that if government, rather than, individuals, spends money, the results will be more positive for everyone. That just isn’t so, as history keeps showing. It’s not the case that government will spend more on top of what individuals spend. For the government to spend more, individuals have to spend less. So we’re not getting more economic activity, we’re really getting less because filtering money through government before pumping it back into the economy results in waste and inefficiency and leads to less money being spent and invested.
One of the losing arguments used by opponents of same-sex marriage was this: If the state changes the definition of marriage to include couples of the same sex, multiple-partner marriages will be next. Supporters of same-sex marriage and those on the fence about it just didn’t buy the argument that polygamy and polyandry were realistic possibilities. They responded that marriage is between two people, and, anyway, polygamists are a tiny fringe minority whose practices would never gain wide acceptance. Their certainty on these points is amusing.
First, and most obviously, the defense that it is commonly accepted that marriage involves only couples is a peculiar defense coming from people who argue that the current commonly accepted definition of marriage ought to be changed. Commonly accepted practices change over time. Supporters of same-sex marriage have given no good justification for excluding multiple-partner relationships from marriage. They simply assert that marriage is reserved for couples. If the culture shifts in a few generations to one in which multiple-partner living arrangements are common practice (just as cohabiting was once frowned upon but is now widely practiced), what logical defense is there against the charge that reserving marriage for couples only discriminates unjustly against three or four or more people who wish to marry each other?
Then there is the matter of demographics. Only a small fraction of the population (maybe 4 or 5 percent, but it depends on which study you believe) is homosexual. The state is now changing the definition of marriage to include that small minority. Whether you believe that is right or wrong, that is the demographic reality. As a matter of sheer numbers, wouldn’t polygamy appeal to a far broader spectrum of the population? The number of men who would like to have two or more wives is potentially much, much larger than the number of men who want to marry another man. And there will always be a substantial pool of women who would, for various reasons, consider that kind of marriage more appealing than spending their entire lives single.
I’m not saying that approving same-sex marriage will lead to a demand for multiple-partner marriages next year. I don’t think it’s the case that one will directly cause the other. What I’m saying is that polygamy was once commonly accepted and there is no reason to assume that it will not once again gain broader appeal as cultural and social mores change, which they always do. Culture is not stagnant. If it were, the West would still practice slavery, polygamy and polytheism. And really, who 100 years ago, or even 40 years ago, could have imagined that same-sex marriage would become a reality? I don’t think it’s preposterous at all to imagine a scenario a few generations away in which many of the same arguments now used to oppose same-sex marriage will be used to defend couples-only marriage. How will couples-only marriage stand up against the argument that excluding three people from marriage equals official state discrimination and is a violation of civil rights? The only argument I see is that reserving marriage for couples is a) tradition, and b) good for society. But those arguments both lost to civil rights arguments this time around, so why would the outcome be any different in the future if multiple-partner relationships become culturally accepted again?
Democrats in Congress are refusing to shut down Guantanamo Bay’s prison. I wonder, does that make them pro-torture? Does that mean they oppose civil liberties?
When Harry Reid says Gitmo detainees won’t be allowed in the United States and says, “We don’t want them around,” is he guilty of racial or religious prejudice? Is he violating the human rights of innocent victims of U.S. policy?
Now that Democrats in Congress are going out of their way to oppose the Obama administration and continue the Bush policy of keeping terror suspects locked up on that island prison, does that make Obama out of touch with America? Or are Congress and the American people just hopelessly out of touch with Obama’s infallible vision and dazzling moral purity?
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About Andrew Cline
Cline has been editorial page editor of the New Hampshire Union
Leader since October of 2001. His writing has appeared in more than 100
newspapers and magazines, including The Wall Street Journal, The
Washington Post, and National Review.
Write Andrew at cline@unionleader.com
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